Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Yelysavethrad
Many tall tales were written in the 1990s about Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s birthplace. Meanwhile, as long ago as 1987, Kirovohrad-based literature researcher Mykola Smolenchuk found the birth record of the Yelysavethrad Church of the Holy Virgin of Vladimir, in which Archpriest Zachary had personally written that a boy called Volodymyr Vynnychenko was baptized in this church on July 17, 1880. His parents were “Kyrylo, the son of Vasyl, Vynnychenko, a farmer from the village of Vesely Kut-Hryhorivka, Yelysavethrad district, Beshbairak county,” and “Yevdokiya, daughter of Onufriy, his legitimate wife, both being of the Orthodox faith.” Volodymyr was therefore born in Yelysavethrad on July 16, 1880, and baptized the next day. Later, he himself wrote about this more than once, for example, on July 27, 1936, in a letter to a Lviv-based literature researcher Mykhailo Rudnytsky, “I was born in Yelysavet, Kherson province, in July 1880.”
The Vynnychenko clan appeared in the Kherson steppe (now Kirovohrad oblast) during the times of serfdom. Family legend has it that a local landlord borrowed three peasant families in exchange for a few hounds from a Poltava landlord. Those peasants also included Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s ancestors. They settled in the village of Vesely Kut-Hryhorivka (now Hryhorivka, Nova Ukrayinka district, Kirovohrad oblast). Vasyl Vynnychenko, the future writer’s grandfather, had six sons farmed the land farming and were traveling traders. Reading in 1923 Memoir by Yevhen Chykalenko, which also mentioned his family, Volodymyr Vynnychenko thought it necessary to correct the memoirist, “...my father was never an affluent peasant. A shepherd, a hired worker at several estates, i.e., a genuine proletarian. Having married my mother, he settled down in town and tried to live off trade. Yet, the land called him back and he rented a plot from a crooked landlord who fleeced and threw him off that plot. Following this, the whole family set off to Siberia in search of land to live on. Short of reaching Siberia, they settled somewhere near Cheliabinsk, lived in grinding poverty, and finally fled back to Ukraine.”
Kyrylo Vynnychenko married the widow, Yevdokiya Pavlenko, a Yelysavethrad inn-keeper. She was five years her husband’s senior and encumbered with three children — Andriy, Ilko, and Maria. Volodymyr Vynnychenko spent his childhood both in the town and country. He was often taken to his grandfather Vasyl in Hryhorivka. This is why it easy to discern these two sources of the writer’s early childhood impressions in his children’s short stories (1910s) and the Necklace cycle (1923).
In 1912 in France he wrote the short story Fedko the Prankster inspired by his reminiscences of the 1880s Yelysavethrad and risky games with his peers on the River Inhul. Vynnychenko attached many of his character traits to his offbeat hero, a daring, proud, feisty but big-hearted boy, a little “experimenter,” who hated tranquillity. This was also confirmed in his mother’s tales recorded by the writer’s wife Rozaliya at about the same time when this story was being written: they featured some episodes and details that occur in the short story itself. “Volodymyr played with the neighboring children, holding them a bit in terror. He was very strong for his age, strong-willed and stubborn...”
Having an extremely keen memory, Volodymyr learned to read very early. The posters his brother Andriy, a print shop worker, brought home were his first primer. Playing around, he would cut out and stick letters onto the wall and then ask the grownups what they meant. At the age of seven, the boy went to a primary school and was transferred to the Yelysavethrad Boys’ Grammar School in 1890. This might not have happened if a primary school lady teacher had not convinced the Vynnychenko spouses that their son was very talented and should continue his studies. What finally tipped the scales was the word of Andriy Pavlenko who offered to pay the money required for his little brother’s grammar school education. Volodymyr Vynnychenko went to grammar school for nine years, from 1890 to 1899. This interesting educational institution taught such illustrious figures as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Igor Tamm, Polish author Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, author of the Katyusha lyrics Georgy Langemak, Russian satirist Don Aminado, etc.
Yet, Vynnychenko was a special case. At a very early age, he showed an inclination to revolt. Yury Tyshchenko noted in the essay Who Is Vynnychenko? (1917) the social and class-related sides of the situation, as well as national injustice. The idea is that “grammar schools catered for rich parents’ offspring only,” so “the children of peasants and workers felt ill at ease there” and were keenly aware of their inferiority. But Volodymyr, who also heard that the school wanted to make “an office-holder, not a swineherd” out of him, was a “feisty kid.” He always beat off those who made fun of him, and this strained his relations with the teachers and some of the pupils. Vynnychenko reacted very sharply, sometimes even eccentrically, to insults; he had an extremely proud nature, considered freedom and independence the cornerstone of his decisions and deeds, and often acted contrary to circumstances and common opinion. Like his Fedko the Prankster, he won the reputation of an enfant terrible at an early age.
In the end, Vynnychenko did not receive his diploma from the Yelysavethrad Boys’ Grammar School. He spent the summer of 1899 traveling, perhaps following the example of the then-popular Maksim Gorky whose roaming Rus’ became well-known to many. It was then that the young man sensed his destiny: he was enchanted by literature. Yet, in truth, Volodymyr experienced his first creative torments when he was still a schoolboy. Many years later he confessed this in a letter to Rudnytsky, “I wrote my first prosaic short story in 1901 and the poem about Zaporozhzhian Sich (I can’t remember the exact title) still earlier, in 1894, for which I was politically imprisoned for the first time in the grammar school (a week of a dark punishment cell).”
To get his education certificate, Volodymyr Vynnychenko made his way to Zlatopol (now Novomyrhorod, Kirovohrad oblast). His older step-brother Andriy Pavlenko worked there as a jailer. Living with his brother, Volodymyr passed external exams in a Zlatopol school. Thus the school period of life came to a conclusion. Incidentally, Zlatopol can be recognized in the description of Sonhorod in the story Beauty and Strength. Tyshchenko pointed out the following interesting detail in Vynnychenko’s state of mind at the time, “His Zlatopol classmates said that Vynnychenko’s arrival stimulated much discussion and surprise because he turned up wearing peasant clothes, spoke both to schoolmates and school executives in Ukrainian only, and this made the teachers nervous.” Nevertheless, they gave the certificate to a boy they thought was an odd “national activist”. This happened on June 10, 1900, and in August Vynnychenko entered the law department at Kyiv St. Volodymyr University.
That same summer Vynnychenko offered his poem Sofia (another title is The Prostitute) to the Lviv Literaturno-naukovy visnyk (Literary-Scholarly Bulletin). “I once sent it to you, but God knows where it is gone because I don’t have any answers,” wrote the author of the poem about a poor girl seduced by her master’s son, “I think the poem was stopped at the border because it was written by a school graduate who can neither write nor publish anything. If you don’t like it, I beg you to publish it in some other Ukrainian journal. If this is also impossible, please, send it to Zurich...” To Zurich? But Vynnychenko wrote from Znamenka where he was living at some Mr. Apanovych’s place! The mystery is easy to solve: in Zurich lived A. Volyk, a lady friend of Vynnychenko’s, who must have been more experienced in literary affairs than he was himself. She was a writer also, contributing something to the journal... The poem Sofia was never published. Only in 1929 was it found in the archives by literary researcher M. Markovsky and published in the journal Ukrayina.
Once in Kyiv, student Vynnychenko plunged into a whirlwind of social and literary life. Already in February 1902, he was arrested and expelled from the university for taking part in strikes. By 1907, he had had two more convictions, serving a total of three years in Kyiv’s prisons. And in the heat of Stolypin’s reaction, Vynnychenko and some of his friends illegally crossed the border. From then on, they could only come to Russia with false passports.
In 1911 he finally managed to visit his native Yelysavethrad. And now let us read Vynnychenko’s novel Po-Sviy (1912) whose hero Vadym Stelmashenko, a poet, comes to the town of his childhood and adolescence after eight years of absence, “...Standing in front of the door, he clearly imagined how it all would be; imagined the way his mother would be dressed, his father would be sitting, and what he, Vadym, would say on entering the house...” Stelmashenko had just returned from exile in the wilds of Siberia, where he had an affair that ended in the death of his beloved Natalia and their son (the events of this tragic story remind us of the affair Vynnychenko himself had with Lucy Goldmerstein, which culminated in the death of their son in late 1908 in Geneva). A Socialist and follower Nietzsche, an experimenter who worried about establishing his unlimited freedom and will, Vadym Stelmashenko lives through a painful redemption from his own Nietzscheism. As the ice gradually melted in his eyes, his soul was again full of normal filial feelings. The less Vadym desires to be a proud recluse like Zarathustra, the more attractive this character of Vynnychenko becomes.
The novel Po-sviy has a host of signs pointing to Yelysavethrad. Chapters 4 and 5 are especially characteristic in this respect: Stelmashenko walks down the city streets, occasionally recognizing its houses. The Rybatskys’ house, where there was once a tavern now is a pharmacy... Preobrazhenska Street “full of noise and light” as well as the rattle of trams, cars, and draft horses... An old yellow house, “where one student a year hangs himself”... Now he meets his kith and kin, his first love... The novel is not accidentally titled Po-sviy for it is about the “return of the prodigal son” to his land, home, parents, and in the final analysis to himself...
By all accounts, when Vynnychenko arrived in Yelysavethrad in 1911 he visited his native place for the last time. A few years later, he as head of the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic government signed a document on establishing a teachers college in Yelysavethrad. Then followed his lifelong emigration. Volodymyr Vynnychenko would write letters from faraway France and pass them and some money to his relatives with the help of strangers, concealing his name in order not to put his relatives to danger.
